It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)

Saturday, October 18, 2014

In machinery, the appropriation of living labour
by capital achieves a direct reality in this respect as well:
It is, firstly, the analysis and application of mechanical and chemical laws,
arising directly out of science, which enables the machine to perform the same
labour as that previously performed by the worker. However, the development of
machinery along this path occurs only when large industry has already reached a
higher stage, and all the sciences have been pressed into the service of
capital; and when, secondly, the available machinery itself already provides
great capabilities. Invention then becomes a business, and the application of
science to direct production itself becomes a prospect which determines and
solicits it. But this is not the road along which machinery, by and large,
arose, and even less the road on which it progresses in detail. This road is,
rather, dissection [Analyse] -- through the division of labour, which
gradually transforms the workers' operations into more and more mechanical
ones, so that at a certain point a mechanism can step into their places.(See
under economy of power.)Thus, the specific mode of working here appears
directly as becoming transferred from the worker to capital in the form of the
machine, and his own labour capacity devalued thereby. Hence the workers'
struggle against machinery. What was the living worker's activity becomes the
activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labour by capital confronts
the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labour into itself --
'as though its body were by love possessed'. [3]